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Follower-Slave of the Buddhadharma.
Have a PhD in History; but am currently unemployed, and have been underemployed and unemployed since receiving that doctorate degree.
Have traveled around the world and have lived in various cities across the world, mostly in Europe and in the Americas. Served four years in the US military as a non-combattant.

Our English word for drug comes from the French word, ‘drogue.’ La drogue signified merchandise, but not just any merchandise commonly found in the markets of seventeenth-century Marseilles, France. This merchandise, like the other dangerous concoctions around the world, came from the Orient, or Asia. ‘Epiciers,’ or the spice sellers, legally sold this occult, hard stuff.

This drogue was a peculiarly special medicine, and not just for the ailing. It was really for those unfortunate, bedridden sick, dying from terrible and unknown pains. La drogue always sat ready for its desperate takers. It willfully took flight with its sacrificial victims onto the sweet ride of death.

Writing of death, the decade of the 1830s was an exceptional period for the ruthless scavenger cloaked in the monk’s robe, sporting the skull face and carrying the European peasant’s scythe. But this look of death was a bit more distinct and sensual. It didn’t fume the rancid Euro-sailor reek that made most foreigners almost vomit. It smelled more like a long pipe of sweet-smelling tar mixed with tobacco, or even cannabis. Accompanying this drug of the sweet death, was a deep aroma of British gunpowder and the bad death.

The greatest drug dealers in human history have not been the Colombian or Mexican narcos-cartels, nor the Afghan poppy bosses of the Golden Crescent, nor even the Kuomintang plant lords of the Golden Triangle; instead, the greatest drug dealers in human history have been two humongous Empires found in world history: the Second British Empire, (1783-1956), and the current Amerikan Empire, (the USA), with special emphases on its intelligence services, both the CIA and the DEA, or the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Within the dens and markets on the dirty South Pacific sea, off the coast of China, such as Hong Kong, existed the Imperial Trade. The time was around the 1830s. The British ran the Trade and controlled most the monopolies on the Trade. Other Europeans and European-colonials also participated in the madness, and just like the days of African slavery.

That sinister trade in humans meant the Black Gold kidnapped on the ‘dark continent,’ and then murdered en mass on the American continents during the 1700s. But this latter trade flourished under a stickier commodity.

The Qing Dynasty in China could not tolerate such attacks to its honor and dignity. The Europeans had slowly moved into the ports and cities, like Shanghai. Not only did the smelly and untrustworthy Europeans move in, but they stayed and demanded special ‘rights,’ or legal privileges for their dopey merchants.

The Euros also commanded special monopolies on their sacred commodities. The British, French, Dutch, Americans, Germans, Italians, Russians, and other flush faced monstrosities walked the ancient streets of the Chinese Emperor like demons on parade. The other devious interlopers were Japanese merchants.

The Qing Emperor decided to act and demanded that the British respect his law banning the importation of this other Black Gold, opium, and this time cultivated in Iran, Afghanistan and India. This Black Gold of the nineteenth-century had the infamous name of the Opium Trade.

Like other European colonial thugs before and after, the British East India Company refused to respect the Chinese law in the land of China. Did the British East India Company respect the Americans’ anti-Tea tax rebellions during the Revolutionary War in 1776?

The British already had the tea, and very soon, tea drinking became part of British middle class culture, with creamy milk added, and which is still widely popular in Britain today. But what about the millions of Chinese addicts visiting the dirty dens infested with bed bugs, so they could the smoke the magical pipe and hopefully – die the sweet death?

Britain weighed its options carefully, and decided that it could defeat the once great Chinese Qing Emperor. They were right. The British fought at least two full-scale wars against the corrupt and decadent, Chinese imperial court, murdering 50,000 Chinese anti-opium fighters with British rifle musket fire. The evil joke was on the Chinese, since they had first invented gunpowder about a thousand years ago! The British monopolists also took the port island city of Hong Kong, which they would not return to China until 1997.

China meanwhile began to drown within its own loss of face. The Taiping Rebellion would burst against the hated and dishonest European ‘buyers and sellers.’ Even with that defeat, the Chinese organized themselves into even more powerful secret societies, such as the Boxers, which also led to a full-on rebellion – and later, the Chinese Nationalist Revolution. With the Communist victory of 1949, the Chinese finally instituted real land reforms and ousted the European invaders from its territories – except for the cities of Hong Kong and Macao.

The worst slap in the face for China were the millions of pathetic addicts that lost their wills to live. How many lives and dignities snuffed themselves out for the light smoke of the sweet death?

But the colonial murderers and liars had the last laughs pitted against them. The Chinese opium den culture spread throughout the world’s cultures. Chinatowns opened up flea bag hotels for desperate Chinese workers trying to make some capital through slave wage work across the globe. Within these ‘Chinatowns,’ opium dens flourished, from Lima, Peru to San Francisco, California, from London to Penang, from Paris to Bangkok. A new class of ‘druggie’ entered the darkened smoking lairs.

In the late nineteenth-century, the rooms reeked of the strange blackened tar smoke, the interior decor was of dreary stained long mirrors, red burgundy-brown sienna peeling rice paper, and on the floor red burgundy, phony silk pillows and cushions. If the place had more ‘class,’ then they added dressing partitions and fans for the customers.

The customers were often Europeans, of both sexes, and many came from good class backgrounds and education. Some of them seemed to have that ‘bohemian’ look on them. What attracted those Euro-bohemians to the smoky dens once found in the rat and bug infested holes of Hong Kong?

Opium attracted them – and those sensual Chinese dens were only a small part of the Oriental exotic ambience. Opium, Morphine, Heroin and opium’s hundreds of both illegitimate and legitimate offspring, have offered to the world the peaceful nodding sleep, the deliverance from acute human suffering, both physical and mental, and the sweet death for the melancholic and hard life. The ultimate narcotic is for the dying, for those that desperately want to die, and for those that want to explore their own marvelous and sensual deaths.

For the evil empires of our modern world, and especially for the Amerikan Empire of Sociopaths, opium and its derivatives, with the refined genius of the permanently illegal Heroin, have become golden weapons in the marked arms of intelligence agencies. They are the finest weapons in the subduing of armies, of entire dangerous populations – and they have worked properly every single time – and still do until this very day.

Heroin still retains its status as the artist, traveler and outlaw drug in the Euro-American world of bohemians and rebels. For most of Heroin’s history, most addicts were often men. Yet recently, thousands of attractive young women, and often in their teens, have discovered the occult power of heroin in successfully controlling body weight. Only heroin can offer the female desire for the eating of sweets while retaining the skinny body frame. The sight of a woman’s dark and scrawny heroin body, or ‘heroin chic,’ offers the most profound sensual attraction of the dangerous ‘fashion model.’ Such is the strange and long history of the poppy plant first cultivated and traded in Mesopotamian Asia about 5,000 years ago.

The Sumerians traders referred to the poppies as the joy plants. Their brisk trade in joy, and the sweet death, made them welcome commodities in Ancient Egypt, the Phoenician coastal cities, and within the Greek city states. The ancient medical writer and philosopher, Hippocrates, referred to this plant as a good medicinal herb against pain, internal disorders and acute diarrhea.

Islamic merchants controlled the first opium monopoly during the medieval period, (800-1600 A.D.). Meanwhile, Europeans feared the drug’s ‘oriental’ powers. Opium growing spread to the Mediterranean climate, and especially into Egypt and Turkey, with another lethal commoditized drug, sugar.

Things changed swiftly during the Renaissance period, when the Portuguese traders, and later Dutch merchants, started to cut into the great Muslim traders’ monopoly of the plant. The Dutch even invented the offshoot of Opium, Laudanum, which mixed the poppies in liquor in order to deaden the bitter taste.

In the 1800s, a German doctor manufactured another derivative of Opium, called Morphine, named after the Greek God of sleep, Morpheus. Official medical doctors still legally use this drug as the last medicine for the dying. At the end of the nineteenth-century, a scientist working for the Bayer Company, would find the most powerful derivative of Morphine, called Heroin. In the early 1900s, when the Eugenics ideology moved into center stage, European and American governments banned the opiate serums.

Heroin has lately become the weapon exemplar for intelligence agencies, and especially in the US. After the loss of China in 1949, the western Kuomintang, or the KMT, helped by the CIA, fled into the Golden Triangle zone, (northern Thailand, Burma and Laos), and began to fund their terrorism against Communist China with Heroin profits. The eastern KMT took over the island of Formosa. The KMT thugs renamed it Taiwan, and established a notorious dictatorship continually supported by the Amerikan Empire as a cheap manufacturing base, and which still survives today.

What to do with all the Heroin production in the 1950s? The Amerikan Empire intelligence complex flooded African-American poor, urban neighborhoods with the dope, in order to destroy the growing militancy in the ghettos, such as the Copts and the Nation of Islam.

The CIA did not stop here. During the Amerikan Imperial invasion of Indochina, (1961-1975), the intelligence assets began the Air America scheme to transport Heroin from the Golden Triangle region and make some incredible profits. Where did they drop the dope in late 60s and early 70s? Again, they hit the African-American, poor urban areas hard and the urban Latino communities. The Black Panthers tried to fight back, but the FBI had them exterminated. The dope also found its street cred among radicalized returning US veterans and in the countercultural, hipster zones, such as the Lower East Side, NYC, and in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco. LSD-Acid had its days, and so the dope killed the fun.

In the 1980s, while the CIA and NSA worked with major Crack-Cocaine importers from Latin America, they helped restart the Golden Crescent zone of Afghanistan and Pakistan, in order to debilitate the Russian armies fighting the Mujahedeen fighters.

And now, with the Amerikan imperial invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Heroin is showing up everywhere. The Amerikan Empire’s intelligence agencies are dumping the stuff across the small remaining outposts of middle class, ‘white skin privilege’ Amerika. They don’t care where it goes anymore.

Of course, they are still getting help from their narco brothers across the southern border, and from every Mafia group found inside and outside of the US, including ‘the Kosovo Liberation Army,’ the same group of hired thugs the Amerikan Empire supported against Serbia in the 1990s. Joy to the imperial state and mafia criminals!

Other European intelligence agencies have also used the secretive dope weapon. When Italy and Germany began to heat up with youth resistance in the 1970s, such as the RAF, or the Red Army Faction, and the Red Brigades, all of sudden, cheap dope hit the youth scene. When nationalist youth fought furiously in Northern Ireland and in the Basque Country in the 1980s, the IRA and ETA nationalist fighting wings had to start hunting the dope pushers. Greece is the most youth radicalized country in Europe, and there, copious amounts of cheap dope flood the urban streets of Athens.

Why are rebellious youth attracted to the product in the first place? The answers lie in the sensuality of the sweet death, eternal sleep, permanent illegality of the most potent narcotic, and the heroin chic montage of eternal skinniness and authentic cool rebellion.

From the nineteenth-century, European Bohemia began to dabble inside the Opium dens. Some became rabid smokers, while others became ‘opium eaters.’ Oscar Wilde vividly described a literary scene where the eternally young, Dorian Gray, regularly visited the ‘London clubs.’ The French Romantic poet, Charles Baudelaire, fell into a severe Opium addiction while living in decadent Paris. He mellowed out his withdrawals with copious Hashish smoking. Other romantic Opiate dabblers were Thomas de Quincey, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

In the twentieth-century, when music took hold of European and American youth imagination with jazz, rock and its subgenres of metal, grunge and punk, Heroin embraced its newfound artist friends. Almost the entirety of America’s great jazz musicians got hooked into the Heroin miasma, such as Coltrane, Parker, Baker, Monk, Davis, Charles and Holliday. With Rock it has been about the same, and it is still this way. Some of the tragic deaths of numerous rock stars have had their connections to the Opiate serum. Even Hollywood actors have taken the Heroin plunge, such as Alma Rubens, Wallace Reid, Bela Lugosi, Montgomery Clift, John Belushi, Robert Pastorelli, River Phoenix, Chris Farley and Phillip Seymour.

Most importantly, Heroin has recently found another home among female models and handsome young women that don’t want to deal with the contemporary mental and physical pains of having to continually losing weight and staying thin. They have discovered that regular yoga workouts and vegetarian fad diets require enormous amounts of personal discipline and struggle. They are too sensitive for such fighting, so they have uncovered another secret weapon to keeping thin – the romantic life of the fringe drug addict. Heroin chic truly is chic, and in our modern world, it is here to stay.

And so here is the strange and fascinating history of the Opium drug. Across the globe millions of working class addicts have to struggle daily in order to feed their brutal habits and avoid the horrible withdrawals. Wealthy addicts have their stable connects, can simply shoot the medicine in their rooms, and die peacefully in their homes. Official doctors can prescribe various ‘legal opiates,’ such as Codeine, Vicodin, Fentanyl, Demerol, Suboxone, Percodan, Oxycontin and Dilaudid; while some unfortunate street peddlers now rot in the Amerikan gulag.

Its origins, like Cannabis, come from the exotic, mystical and occult Orient. At present, Heroin flourishes everywhere on the planet. A strange social concoction of artists, intelligence agents, musicians, disreputable politicians, poets, mafiosi and models have fallen in love with the poppy plant, yet Heroin offers the deep mental-physical release to all that use it. This utopia mixed with exaltation ultimately explains its rampant popularity worldwide. And finally, it relieves all physical and mental suffering – leading us all to the sweet death.

For those of us unfortunates trying to survive in the Amerikan Empire, we always have to tolerate another war that the state apparatus in D.C. and the corporate medias regularly push. We have had the infamous Drug War, the Indian Wars, the Mexican War, various foreign invasions and interventions, the Civil War, WWI and WWII, the War against Drunk Driving, (really against alcohol), the Mormon War, the War against Terrorism, (well, against various low-level ‘terrorists’ – not state terrorists), the Cold War against International Communism, the War against Crime and the Poor, (low-level crime again – not against corporate or state criminals), the War against Carbon Gas Emissions (?), the War against Obscenity, (basically against erotica or anything having to do with sensuality), the War against Tax Evaders, (certain tax evaders however), etcetera.

The Amerikan Empire has actually been engaged in numerous hidden wars since its inception in 1790. In the early 1800s, the US government sent a naval invasion force into Tripoli, North Africa, in order to punish the Barbary ‘pirate states,’ for example. The US government has overthrown governments, bombed and blown up humans, assassinated people, and instigated economic sanctions against scores of countries around the world – without ever declaring any official war whatsoever.

The same has also been true in the domestic sphere. In the early to mid 1800s, there was a national political party against the Freemasons, and later, there were the infamous Know Nothings that violently went after the Roman Catholics. The Amerikan Empire allowed both political parties to legally conduct their violence, just as the US government had unofficially allowed lynch murder against African-Americans and other criminal elements.

Nowadays, the political police of the Amerikan Empire, the FBI, regularly persecute Muslim-Americans, and there are now thousands of them rotting in the Amerikan gulag for longer prison sentences than most murderers and rapists.

The US government currently manages a host of other undeclared and subversive wars against particular targets. Most recently, the US government has pushed major corporate banks into robbing the deposits of certain businesses related to erotica, guns, cannabis, homeopathic drugs, organic tobacco, organic agriculture and locally brewed spirit-alcohols. The US government has regularly persecuted other small businesses that have had peculiar banking habits.

There has even been a recent, ongoing war that has acted in a far more deadlier fashion. This engagement represents the American Empire’s War against both our bodies and our minds, meaning their physical aspects. Why would the US government want to destroy our bodies and our minds?

The answer lies with the complete US government support for monopolistic practices of various major corporations in biotechnology, (such as Monsanto), processed foods, (such as Tyson), fast food joints, (such as McDonald’s), supermarket mega chains, (such as Wal-Mart), and beverage distributors, (such as Coca-Cola). Living inside this Empire is extremely hazardous to our health.

First, most of our public water suffers from hidden contamination due to fluoridated-chlorinated bleaching, while natural gas monopolies possess legal corporate rights to infect ground water supplies.

Second, most of the foods that one sees in corporate supermarket shelves have GMO, or Genetically Modified Organism infections. The meats and fishes are often from overcrowded and murderous factory farming, where the corporate processors even resort to animal torture and wholesale extermination. The corporate processors regularly inject the cattle animals with BVH growth hormones, and they overdose these same animals with overflowing antibiotics in order to hide the feces soaked, mutilated, infected sores.

American people’s notorious struggles with obesity, diabetes, circulatory blood diseases and cancers is not just because of large plate portions received inside of American restaurants. The culprit lies in the GMO poisons plastic wrapped for unwary consumers. This explains the reasons why the lumpens, and many of the working and middle classes in America suffer more from obesity than the bourgeois-owner social class. They often don’t have the money to buy the ‘organic’ fresh, local stuff.

Third, the American landscape, inclusive of the land, air and water, suffers from environmental contaminants due to the greater legal privileges given to mega corporations. Superfund sites now exist in all urban and rural environments. Certain restricted areas are actually off-limits to humans due to nuclear testing, chemical fallout and other industrial disasters.

A few ‘accidents’ have even become international lessons in the consequences of unregulated corporate personhood, such as the Exxon-Valdez Disaster in Alaska and the BP-Oil Spill in the Louisiana Gulf. Another corporate killer, Union Carbide, murdered thousands of Indians after one of their own negligent fallouts.

Fourth, most of our cleansers and cleaners, both for both our bodies and for the household, contain various contaminants, which actually destroy our interior worlds – even though they ‘get the job done.’ Some unwary gardeners have used the weed killer, ‘Roundup,’ which is from the same corporation that helped produce Napalm gas murdering millions of Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.

Fifth, The US government continually protects these same monopolies, often through periodic federal and state legislation, while the mega-corps will often try new public relations approaches in order to cover up past crimes. Regular citizens are the ones that have to endure the aftershocks of environmental suffering. The corporate boards of directors and owners live in special, gated community areas – often more ‘environmentally diverse.’

The so-called regulatory agencies, such as the well-armed FDA, or the Federal Drug Administration, protect the licensed and corporate killers, while they often target the local homeopathic drug providers for ‘fraud.’ The US govt.’s Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management , (BLM), are also well-armed with machine guns. Again, they prefer to harass the regular people that use ‘their properties,’ rather than the corporate monopolies.

Sixth, the US government also works in tandem with another dubious triple-headed, monopoly monster, called the AMA, the APA and the ADA, or the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Dental Association. This unholy alliance moves into both the Biotech and Insurance corporate rackets where the ideology of ‘doctoring’ has transformed into a lucrative legal drug trade, while some expensive surgeries have full legal support. Meanwhile, alternative health programs receive the labels of ‘quackery,’ or unregulated and dangerous options.

One such government supported medical practice, or torture in recent medical history, represented the use of lobotomies on Americans, from the 1940s to 1960s. A few unfortunates, without their consent of course, had to undergo the ‘surgery,’ while imprisoned inside mental institutions. The psycho-quacks often used ice picks to rip apart the frontal lobes of their victims. Naturally, most of the victims either died painful deaths within a few years, or they turned into human blobs with little mental functioning. The psycho-quacks stopped using lobotomies due to the later efficacy of psychotropic medications.

Millions of Americans, especially active children, spinster women, hyper-intelligent young men, and returning combat veterans have bizarre, made up diagnoses stamped to their personalities. They are now the laboratory animals for the more powerful and legal psychotropic medications. The continual mass shootings in gun free zones across the country attest to their potency.

I have my own personal story. After living in Europe for some years, I decided to return to the Amerikan Empire. My first impressions during my return to the States, besides the flags flying everywhere and the massive loads of dangerous felony laws for every conceivable action, was the nasty looking, smelling and tasting American food.

In this case, the Europeans were right about American food – it was lethal garbage. The low standards of American foods were quite horrid from the low standards found in the cheap supermarkets in Europe. American foods generally had more of that bland and chemical taste. The meats and fish seemed worse off than the vegetables.

I also heard stories about the massive concentration camps that processed millions of murdered animals annually in the heart of the country. After seeing an undercover video of a slaughterhouse, I decided to become a vegetarian.

I was then a vegetarian for eleven years. I had replaced meats, fish and eggs with breads, rice, legumes and lots of soy products, but I still had a hard time losing weight. After a few years, I also realized that my vegetarian diet of soy, wheat and corn contained massive amounts of genetically modified poisons – and I especially discovered this debacle inside the vegan treats, many of which contained TVP, or textured vegetable protein, and processed GMO soy tofu.

Due to such body and health issues, I had quit the vegetarian diet and began to partake of the local diet coming from small farmers, collectors, ranchers and hunters. I only ate locally killed meats, and locally harvested nuts, fruits and vegetables.

Like millions of my fellow Americans on the permanent health watch, I must constantly live on guard, and stand ready against the relentless, genetically modified, crap food onslaught. As thousands of other Americans understand the truth, from this time on, I expose the US government’s insidious war against our bodies and our minds. This war is dead on serious, for we only come equipped in this life with one set.

A cold wind was howling through the medieval streets of Rome during middle December. The days were real short. Darkness even shadowed the moon. This particular day was in the middle of the month, and the year was 1485. Christmas had its parties coming up, but the Pope Caesar had other nefarious plans tucked into his fat stomach. The sinister name of intolerance and hypocrisy was none other than Pope Innocent VIII, (the Eighth).

On this nefarious date he issued a strange papal bull against witchcraft and sorcery that seemed to infect the women of Europe, and especially the First Reich of Germany, bizarrely called, the Holy Roman Empire. This Empire was neither holy nor Roman.

Within this peculiar papal condemnation, he also cited the use of a demonic herb, called cannabis, often found, or imagined, in satanic religious rites. His informant-experts for these underground, conspiratorial satanic covens represented two German Dominican monks, Jakob Spengler and Heinrich Kramer. They would soon publish a nasty book, called ‘The Hammer of the Witches,’ which would help in the murder of close to 200,000 ‘witches,’ mostly marginalized women, during the next 250 years in Europe and in America.

Unfortunately for the plant ‘cannabis sativa,’ this strange and mystical herb from deep Asia, received the taint of evil with the papal stamp of approval. Yet, this same Pope Innocent the Eighth enjoyed some other mortal sins during his reign. He was obese and lived a life of extreme luxury inside the papal palace. He fathered two illegitimate children and had them married off into one of the strongest Families in Renaissance Italy, the Medici. He dipped some of the papal finances into the new Portuguese African Slave Trade. Meanwhile, he tried to revive the Papal Crusades of another Pope Innocent, in order to exterminate the Muslim Turks, the Protestant Waldensians in Northern Italy, and the Hussites in the Czech lands. All cannabis haters in history have shared three evil characteristics: intolerance, gross hypocrisy and state murder.

What is it about cannabis sativa that attracts such hatred and venom? The answer lies in its historical origins: the mystical rites for Lord Shiva and the Islamic Assassins in the medieval period. Cannabis still has these mystical, ‘orientalist’ associations to this actual day. Whether the foreign visitor enters the medinas of Morocco or the festivals dedicated to Shiva in India and Nepal, the scent of the cannabis herb inundates the consciousness.

From its evil oriental connections until its later appearances in the United States, cannabis would connect to a more infamous notoriety. African-American artists smoked the herb while they played their demonic, African sensualized beats, called jazz. Attractive white women even took off their shoes in the smoky clubs, and they danced with the demons. Mestizo, mixed race, Mexican fruit pickers and outlaws also smoked the leaf, called ‘mota,’ during their raucous partying. The dangerous, criminal classes, of course, used the oriental poison. The Amerikan Imperial thugs had taken notice. The historical hatred against cannabis has simply been another combined form of intolerance and murder.

Cannabis is actually a marvelous and natural soft drug. It relaxes and calms the mental nerves, and helps with bouts of nausea and gastrointestinal pains. Some doctors state that cannabis has other helpful healing properties. Cannabis can spark interior mental activity or engaging conversation. It stimulates the human appetites, both culinary and sexual. The drug goes perfectly with foods, entertainment, the arts and it especially compliments other natural drugs found on the Earth, such as alcohol, coffee and tea.

The only negatives to the drug are certain habitual users of it. It seems to have the similar effects of antidepressants on them, which produce lethargy, ego self-obsessions, or minor neuroses. But these are some excessive users. I have also personally met aggressive and successful attorneys that were avid smokers of the weed.

I return to cannabis’ ancient history and its orientalist associations. Lord Shiva, the God of both Creation and Destruction, the Cosmic Dance and the Holy Lingam, (phallic power), the revealer of mystical Tantra, patron of cows, yoga and the third sex, married to the goddess, Parvati, father to the god, Ganesh – also partook of the mystical drink, called ‘soma.’ Legend has it that the mystical drink was none other than ‘bhang,’ a milky concoction containing cannabis.

Shiva’s wandering followers called ‘sadhus,’ still partake of the magical perfumed medicine. During my travels around the world, I have seen these holy men, and some thieving-fakers claiming to exist as sadhus, smoking cannabis out of funnel type ceramic pipes called ‘chillum.’ Watching those holy men in action with their long dread locks, scruffy beards, blue and white-painted dyes, bodies smeared with cow dung, rope necklaces and bracelets, and dirty loin cloths, added to the whole Indian-Asian mystical effect.

On a more common level, during the Hindu festival of Holi, which happens around springtime, young Indians and Nepalese drink the marvelous liquid ‘bhang’ shakes, or ‘lassies,’ and later, hit the public streets throwing brightly colored dyes on the surrounding partiers and walkers. They hit me too – which added to the great fun during that day. Shiva’s gift was a truly a wonderful act.

Islam conquered the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent in the middle of the eleventh century. The cannabis magic of Shiva would also influence the Sufi Muslim mystics that lived in those regions. Even the great Sufi poet and mystic, Rumi, praised the herb and the wine. Cannabis entered the Islamic world: it stayed and it prospered. Still today in the Islamic world from North Africa to Afghanistan, the traveler can spot old men sitting in cafes, wearing their ‘chalaba’ long outfits with hoods. They smoke the green and brown ‘kif’ in their long pipes, while they sip on herbal mint tea, Turkish coffee and chew on honey snacks. Religious controversies have continued between the Sunni, Shia and Sufi branches of Islam – but smoking the flowering buds united them all.

One of the truths of human history has been its reign of absurdity. Cannabis had attached itself to one of the Shia sects of medieval Islam – ‘the Assassins.’ The Assassins were part of the Ismaili sect or the ‘Seveners.’ They also drank the luscious wine and smoked the enchanting herb.

The medieval Japanese Shogunates had their ‘ninjas’; while Medieval Islamic World Culture had their assassins. The assassins lived outside of society. Those disciplined holy warriors squatted in abandoned, foreboding military castles in northern Syria, Iraq and Iran. Their founder, Hassan i Sabbah, or ‘The Old Man of the Mountain,’ organized this Shia sect military order into a hierarchical brotherhood. Inside the castle, the warriors studied religious and philosophical texts, scientific works, learned various languages, and most importantly, the arts of killing. Their three preferred methods moved towards the silent variety: the dagger, the poison and strangulation.

Their victims were always political leaders within the Islamic world. If the Islamic political hack instituted unjust acts, mandated cruel laws, oppressed the poor, allowed poverty to accumulate, or stole lots of money from the just – then the Assassins went on the attack.

The Assassins first left a note pinned with a small dagger within the confines of the caliph or sultan’s palace. If that didn’t work, then the spiritual leader picked an Assassin to fulfill the last deed – a violent death. The Assassins always reached their victims, and after killing the state bum, they would often let frightened onlookers see the terminating work. Many of the assassins never returned from their ultimate missions.

Only one Islamic political-military ruler survived them – Saladin the Great. He survived three attempts on his life. They aroused fear in both the Islamic potentates and the European royal Crusaders. One of the Crusader kings even used the Assassins as allies against his Islamic rivals. Their enemies called them, ‘hashasheen’ in Arabic, or the Troublemakers.

From this Arabic word, the European Crusaders, and especially the Venetian merchant, Marco Polo, tied some connections between the sinister Oriental herbal paste, ‘hashish,’ with Assassin lore. According to the ignorant Euro-experts, hash was the powerful ingredient that transformed the Assassins into fanatical killers. This corrupted link also transformed European languages on the continent.

Most European languages have a separate word for killing and for murder: ‘matar,’ in Spanish, ‘tuer,’ in French, and ‘uccidire,’ in Italian. But these three languages share the same original word for murder, ‘asesinar, assassiner, assassinare.’ This outrageous relation between cannabis and irrational violence even stayed well into the 1930s USA with crap movies such as ‘Reefer Madness.’

This marvelous soft drug of cannabis has had its absurd orientalist associations. The real issue of cannabis was not its properties, but the European hatred for ‘the other,’ which still fuels the sociopathology of the Amerikan Empire. The murderous and hateful world empire still hunts for its victims through its continuous War against Cannabis, and all other ‘illegal drugs.’ The CIA can deal whatever it wants, yet the same US government prefers smokers to rot inside its hundreds of overpopulated prisons. In spite of all of this hate, Lord Shiva’s precious gift still wafts its distinctive breeze throughout all the lands of the Earth.

The decade of the 850s BCE transformed into years of great agricultural harvests, the warm summers that always brought the good rains in the end. Some empires were on the move during this time too, such as the powerful Olmec city states, the Zhou Chinese feudal kingdoms, the military advances of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and the growing naval power of the Phoenician city states along the Mediterranean.

Another city was growing too. They called themselves, Thebes, and many of the original warrior-nobles descended from some of the great pharaohs of Egypt, such as Ramses, and the great king of the rich city of Mycenae, called Midas. At least, those elites said this was true. The city also had strong fortified walls and had a high and central place on a thin strip of southern Hellas, or Greece. Its aristocrats possessed good reputations for fierce fighting – since many of them were also sexually involved with each other.

This city was also well-known for its peculiar sacraments in honor of its patron god, called Dionysus, or in the Roman name, Bacchus. The ceremonies for this god were not the typical devotions for the Greek gods, such as Apollo, Athena, Zeus, Ares-Mars and Hermes-Mercury. The supposed solemn religious services of Dionysus-Bacchus often transcended into furies of wild drinking, erotic dancing, rough eating and other sensual explorations.

His festival was during the late summer recollection of the wine fruit, the grapes, and their magical transformations into fermented joy. Men and women of public dignity could transcend into crazy barbarians. And they didn’t seem to care if these sensual transformations took place among the darkened frenzies.

Alcohol represents the most powerful and fastest working drug for personal transformation. This very strong fermented concoction contains the power to let go of mind shackles, which can lead into simple and beautiful joyousness. Alcohol’s peculiar pharmacological power explains its might and cultural influence in all world cultures and throughout world history, and even in world cultures that supposedly hate it, such as the Amerikan empire, Evangelical Christianity and Islamic fundamentalism.

But like any drug, it has its very own shackles and snares. The drug of alcohol must go with three important spirits in order for the drinker to reach his or her personal transformations towards letting go and simple joy. Alcohol has to coincide with the wonderful company of family and friends, the practices of celebration and carnival, and always have some good food to soak up the toxins that coexist with the tangy tastes of fermentation.

Around the year 405 BCE, a famous Greek tragedian, or playwright, wrote a piece called ‘The Bacchae.’ The work tells the story of King Pentheus of Thebes that tried to confront the God Dionysus who had visited his city and initiated the crazy worship dedicated to the sweet wine of excess. Pentheus tried to ban, repress, control and survey the decadence of alcohol, yet he ended up getting killed by his own mother, (while he was dressed in a woman’s costume), during the sacred rituals of overindulgence, violence and sensuality. Other ancient Greek rulers tried to ban Bacchus and his holy rites of alcohol drinking, such as King Perseus of Argos and King Lycurgus of Thracia. Like Pentheus, they all failed miserably trying to prohibit the sacred rituals associated with magical wine.

The moral of the theatrical story was clear: leave Bacchus alone, let the people enjoy themselves, don’t try to control and destroy the party – for partying represented a celebration of life, a celebration of the Dionysian spirit that has existed inside all of us.

The Roman Empire would also learn this hard historical lesson. Around the year 186 BCE, the Roman Senate, representing the Roman Republic, had enough of the night-time ceremonies, the secret initiates of drinking societies, and the excessive wildness of the Bacchanalia rites. Bacchus was one of the major Roman gods and there were statues and temples of him everywhere – but the rituals went too far.

Roman slaves acted like military commanders, and Roman women took on the roles of Roman dignitaries. The alcohol consumed during the festival flew beyond indulgence. The secretive initiation rites in order to enter the drinking societies possessed suspicious motivations. The sexual indiscretions after some hot dancing were often quite notorious. The ecstatic music of pipes and drums often brought young women into frenzies of lust and screaming. Every Bacchic celebratory season, there were always violent deaths and other nefarious acts reported. There even existed worshippers, called Bacchants, which only served Bacchus – and they even they dedicated their lives to the god through living in continual drunkenness and dissolution.

Eventually, the Senate had the Roman army exterminate the hard cores that fully lived their existences in Bacchic ecstasies. Bacchus represented an imported god from Greece, and supposedly had its origins from the Egyptians anyway. The Roman Republic destroyed some temples lest some Bacchanalia fanatics try to hide inside them under the protection of the god. New Roman laws prohibited the annual night-time conclaves of secret societies meeting outside of the city.

The Romans did value pragmatism, so they eventually allowed the annual Bacchic celebrations, but they had to support the normal rituals for the gods: sacred oblations and ceremonies in public view at the temple doors, while the rituals and music were open to the full community. The priests and musicians performed the rites both during the day and at night. About fifty years later however, the Roman Republic would disintegrate through its own orgies of violence called the Civil Wars.

And to this very actual day, world ideologies, world religions and world empires have waged a most horrible war against Bacchus. Evangelical Christianity, Psychobabble, Mormon Christianity and fundamentalist Islam still rail against the demonic drink.

But more ominously, since the beginning of the 20th century, the early 1900s, the Amerikan empire has continually waged a holy war against Bacchus and his magical fruits. Some of the more notorious examples have included, a National Prohibition Amendment against alcohol, (1920-1933), state liquor stores and liquor control boards, alcohol sin taxes, dry counties, bar closing hours, Sunday bans on selling beverages, maximum alcohol content laws for beer, banning the importation of Absinthe or the domestic production of corn liquor, raising the minimum wage to imbibe alcohol from 18 to 21, the restrictive Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, or the infamous ATF, and Surgeon Generals that continually fulminate against the drug. Finally, there is the maximum police action against alcohol, or supposedly against drunk drivers, called Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or really, the nation-wide police prohibition action against any drivers that happen to have any alcohol in their blood streams.

Millions of American citizens have lost their lives, both socially and physically, through such state institutional violence. During Prohibition, both the US and state governments purposefully poisoned sections of the ‘illegal’ alcohol supply in order to destroy lives and murder ‘disobedient and degenerate drinkers.’ The US government and state government’s war on DUIs has only helped extort great quantities of citizens’ personal finances and increase the bloated prison population, which is now the largest in the world in both real numbers and in percentage of prisoners to the general population.

Yet it is still quite dangerous to drive on the roads, and deadly accidents still happen regularly in the States. Like Pentheus and the Roman Senate of ancient history, the twisted state cycles versus alcohol are still flexing their muscles of control and legalized violence. But the six truths of history never change, so the same historical cycle has fallen upon the Amerikan empire. Violence is now endemic in American society. A few crazies even prefer the public acts of willful mass murder to any partying whatsoever.

One extreme often follows its opposite extreme. This historical truth has generally explained the attraction of some Communists for suddenly changing over to Fascist movements.

Millions of unfortunate people around the world have taken that other extreme with alcohol.They regularly drink the sacred and fermented juices into the private realms of slow and painful deaths. They drink when they rise, when bored, when they use the toilet, the shower, during work, watching TV, and even before they go to bed. Alcohol helps them pass through their pathetic lives that they truly hate. If they only were dead; instead they exist as alcoholics. Bacchus has given up on them too.

The joyful and liberating spirits of alcohol only flourish under the marvelous company of family and friends, the sensual delights of festivities and carnival, and the delightful tastes of good food. All three of these wonders of life taken together, will transform the Bacchic liquefied gift.

Alcohol opens doors into treasure lands of mental wonder and sensual adventure, and yet when easily overindulged, it is also an intoxication breathing poison, all of which drowns the mind of awareness.